No modern student can examine Latin and the Roman world without eventually encountering Cicero and his speeches. Cicero's Latin continues to be the standard for the language we teach, and his speeches still form the foundation of how we present and explain Roman rhetorical practice and education. Cicero as a political and historical figure is indispensable in any study of the late Republican world and, as L.B. shows, he remained a relevant and central character in discussions of Roman ethics and morality throughout the imperial era. The enduring importance of Cicero in antiquity and today means that L.B.’s contribution will surely attract a wide range of keen readers, from those focusing on Cicero himself, to historians of education and ancient textual transmission, and Latin literary historians.
L.B. aims to trace the reception and scholarly interpretation of Cicero's speeches throughout antiquity and to understand the role schools played in their transmission and survival. L.B. is largely successful in these aims. He does well in linking Cicero's speeches and their survival to educational contexts, while his examination of the various pedagogical functions these speeches played throughout antiquity is also convincing. He discusses how Cicero became synonymous with eloquence, an icon of Latinitas, largely thanks to Quintilian. L.B. emphasises the importance of Cicero for the Roman student and the central place he occupied in learning ‘proper’ Latin orthography, morphology and style. He also highlights the moral and socialising aspects of Roman education by connecting Cicero's pure Latinitas to Roman aristocratic social mores and political power. Of course, in pointing out Cicero's central role in Roman education, as well as the political and social implications of training in Latinitas, L.B. is not necessarily contributing anything new to the scholarly debate. Nevertheless, he takes a comprehensive approach to the topic, discussing Cicero's self-promotion and self-fashioning campaign, criticisms of Cicero's ethical and moral authority in the early empire, Cicero's rehabilitation by Quintilian and Pliny the Younger, and the scholia and commentaries from late antiquity. In this way L.B. brings a wide variety of sources and perspectives together, which will undoubtedly spark further interest in the exegesis and reception of Cicero in antiquity and beyond.
A drawback to the work is that sometimes it is difficult to locate L.B.’s own argument and original contributions, as he has a tendency to quote modern historians frequently and at length. There are pages where much space is devoted to lengthy quotations, such as p. 220, where the final paragraph ends with a seven-line quotation from H.C. Gotoff, without any discussion of this historian's viewpoint. It is also common to see L.B. insert sentences and phrases from secondary scholarship that convey ideas that could easily be expressed in his own words. For a reader, this can be distracting, and it does nothing to bolster L.B.’s own analysis. Rather, this practice detracts from any new perspectives the author is trying to present.
The book's first chapter examines Cicero's attempts to write himself into the Latin literary canon, styling himself as a symbol of rhetorical and political success. It focuses on Cicero's publication strategy and self-fashioning, and the ways in which he endeavoured to create a positive and lasting reputation for both his political career and his written works. L.B. deals well with the tension between the oral and the written nature of speeches. L.B. shows that, by promoting and circulating written forms of his speeches, Cicero was self-consciously doing something new; he essentially created a new literary genre, while forever cementing the crucial connection between speaking well and writing well.
The second chapter examines the textual transmission of Cicero's speeches in antiquity. L.B. focuses on the efforts of Cicero's freedman Tiro and other contemporaries of Cicero, such as Nepos and Atticus, as well as key readers of Cicero in the Antonine Age. L.B. argues that the use of the name of Tiro in manuscripts, and the desire to find such subscription by scholars during the Antonine and later periods, indicates a desire for authentic versions of Cicero, which he ties to educational contexts. L.B. then touches on how Cicero's speeches were collected and grouped. For example, the Catilinarians, Verrines and Philippics were often kept together and were preserved because they formed coherent units. L.B. examines how Asconius Pedianus and the Scholia Bobiensia deal with Cicero's speeches, and gives an overview of papyri, palimpsests and grammatical or rhetorical sources in his analysis of the role schools played in preserving the speeches. A minor criticism in this chapter is that when discussing bilingual Greek–Latin papyri sources, which were part of the education of Greek-speaking Egyptian students, one would expect references to E. Dickey's recent and important work on bilingual education and bilingual language learning resources.
Chapter 3 examines Cicero's cultural legacy. L.B. discusses the tensions in Cicero's reception, between his ambiguous political career on the one hand and his positive and lasting influence on Latin and rhetorical style on the other. L.B. shows convincingly that, despite Cicero's self-fashioning campaign, he was readily accepted as an icon of Latinitas, but, at the same time, was never an exemplum of the moral Roman citizen or politician. After an overview of Cicero's detractors and admirers in the early imperial age, L.B. examines how Cicero became synonymous with ‘eloquence’ and was established as an authority for Latin morphology, orthography and rhetorical style. L.B. emphasises the importance of Quintilian and Pliny the Younger in ‘rehabilitating’ Cicero's reputation and the role of schools and declamatory practice in establishing Cicero as an icon of Latin style.
The final chapter considers how ancient scholars of Cicero's speeches read and conveyed Cicero's rhetorical theory and practice to their readers, namely students and other teachers or scholars of Cicero. This chapter relies heavily on Quintilian, but also examines Asconius Pedianus, the scholia Bobiensia and the scholia Gronoviana. This fourth chapter is by far the longest in the book, with L.B. providing a detailed discussion of the ways in which Cicero's speeches were presented and interpreted by scholiasts. These ancient scholars mined Cicero for examples of how to write elegantly, how to best present a speech orally, effective use of exempla, and the ways in which history was taught through the speeches. At times this chapter reads as a rhetorical handbook in itself. L.B. provides a comprehensive description of Cicero's rhetorical strategy and practice, which he bolsters with ample and detailed evidence from scholiasts and commentators. He argues that these readings and interpretations can help us understand how Cicero was read and understood by students. It would perhaps be interesting to see to what extent ancient students and experienced orators followed such instructions from these teaching manuals. For example, examining extant rhetorical material (e.g. declamations, the Panegyrici Latini and so on) could indicate to what extent commentators’ explanations and recommendations were used in actual rhetoric.
Despite any minor drawbacks, this book is certainly a valuable addition to our understanding of the transmission of educational practices, and the impressive array of primary evidence that L.B. presents, stretching from the late Republic to late antiquity, means this book will find a wide range of readers who will gain much from this engaging contribution.
